A Brighter Past

From a complaint about the economic crisis and the political obstacles to its solution, David Brooks, in today’s Times, slips into a screed about all that has been lost in recent decades. Referring to the British writer Phillip Blond, Brooks decries the “two revolutions”—the one “from the left” that “displaced traditional manners and mores” and “emphasized individual rights” and brought about “welfare” in lieu of “mutual aid societies and charities”; and the free-market one, “from the right,” in which local shops were replaced by malls, local banks by large ones, and “unions withered” (since when was Brooks pro-union?).

Question: which “traditional manners and mores” does Brooks want to restore? The pre-Stonewall criminalization of homosexuality? The pre-Roe criminalization of abortion? The near-unavailability of divorce? And what is it about local practice that he misses? The power of shopkeepers and neighbors and schools to segregate or deny votiing rights? Or the pre-“welfare” squalor of cities where poor people had no access to medical care and the aged poor were often rendered destitute? Does he fantasize that the New Deal and civil-rights legislation (the latter, largely the work of the federal government encroaching on what was often called states’ rights) arose out of Bolshevik schemes to destroy communities in the name of central authority? In short—what is Brooks nostalgic for? He only endorses Blond’s plans to re-energize localities economically and administratively—but what’s truly chilling is Brooks’s apparent underlying vision, or dream, of a historical Neverland, and it’s disingenuous of him, when he complains of changes that have taken place in recent decades, not to say what he’d like American society to revert to.

He needs to see a few classic movies about local power unchecked—whether Fritz Lang’s “Fury” or John Ford’s “Young Mr. Lincoln,” or any one of a host of Depression-era dramas about the misery to which many, outside the purview of charities, were reduced. It’s as if Brooks had watched only M-G-M’s glossiest sentimental romances (and even so, that’s where “Fury” was made) and ignored anything by Warner Bros. Let’s come up with a viewing list for Mr. Brooks; readers, I await your suggestions.

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